Egypt's Surrealists, the Avant-Garde and the Sixties Generation

This course will explore the different iterations of the avant-garde in Egypt across the 20th Century, their historical specificity, and political orientations. Avant-Garde artistic and literary movements in Egypt stand out because of the importance domestic and international politics played to shape them. Common themes within avant-garde literature such as disfiguration, deformation, sexuality, and death were taken further by adding a political dimension, often geared towards leftist ideology such as marxism, socialism, and anarchism, to a trend that started as a way to reflect disappointment in the face of socio-political unrest in Europe. However, in Europe the artistic works focused less on the politics and more on the feelings of despair surrounding war and the resulting loss. In fact, avant-garde theorists in Europe argued to look inward, which created an individualistic artistic style. This course will focus on the two major avant-garde movements in Egypt, Art and Liberty, which was the name of the Surrealist group in Egypt, and the Sixties Generation, which produced a different style of avant-garde works and was not associated with a pre-established movement like Surrealism. We will be looking at the different languages used within those movements, notably Arabic, French, and English, as well as the different media and genres that were used within those movements, such as poetry, the novel, the short story, theatre, film, painting, etc.